The Drone That Came Home

Corrected August 11, 2026. Two passages have been corrected, one in the opening section and one in a footnote. See Corrections at the end.

At 7:13 PM on December 13, 2024, in the town of Cape May Court House at the southern tip of New Jersey, Officer Alyssa Jones of the Middle Township Police Department launched a DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise Advanced drone called “CMC 2,” from Woodview Lane, a residential street. She flew it under the FAA's Part 107 rules that govern commercial and public drone flights, to get a look at the aircraft her town had been calling in for a week. What she got a look at that night, instead, got a look at her.1

An unidentified craft came up the Route 9 corridor toward her position: three white lights on the front, blinking red and green, between 150 and 250 feet up, about the size of a large vehicle. As CMC 2 climbed to around 350 feet, the other craft turned and followed it back to its home point on Woodview Lane. Her own drone’s camera went black and her controller read drone disconnected. The link came back a moment later; she stopped CMC 2 from auto-landing, relaunched, lost sight of the other aircraft, and landed her drone.2

When it was on the ground, the department treated the malfunction as evidence. Cape May County engaged a private consultant who pulled CMC 2’s own flight record off the controller (the DJI data logs, the GPS track, the signal-strength readings) and worked backward through what the aircraft had been through in the air. The consultant’s referral identified the event as a “Potential EMI Flight” (electromagnetic interference); the forwarding officer characterized the drone as “in fact jammed by the unknown unmanned aircraft.” What set Middle Township apart is that the case moved up the chain, from local police toward the FBI. Whether the interference was ordinary radio congestion, an equipment fault, or something deliberate, the record does not say.3

The aircraft’s own onboard log carried the encounter in the machine’s vocabulary. Inside a seven-minute, ten-second flight, and inside seventy-eight seconds of it: a proximity warning that another aircraft was dangerously close, two downlink losses (the radio link between the controller and the drone dropped out twice, for 1.7 and 40.7 seconds), a forced return-to-home, and a Failed to obtain operator location alert while the system was still flagging the other aircraft as nearby. The Mavic 2 Enterprise Advanced records to an onboard SD card; no card was in the slot, meaning the camera was never going to bring back imagery no matter what happened in the air. A check of ADS-B Exchange (a public database of aircraft transponder signals) for those seven minutes shows the sky over Jones was not empty. Six aircraft passed within three miles of her launch point, most of them airliners five and six miles overhead. One was not. At 7:18 PM a United States Air Force C-17 transport, tail number 03-3125, was two and a half miles away and descending through 2,250 feet, having come down from 5,250 feet and twenty-eight miles out while she was flying. Her drone saw it, or saw something. DJI’s AirSense reads the same ADS-B broadcasts, and the log fired that proximity warning three times. Another officer in the same department, the same evening, took a call about a drone above the marsh a few miles up the road and identified it himself as a C-17. What none of that explains is the signal.4

On a recorded administrative line two hours earlier, Corporal Martin Lindholm of the same Middle Township police had phoned Cape May County dispatch to set up the drone detail Jones was about to fly. He named the four officers on the roster, mentioned in passing two “loaner drones” (borrowed counter-UAS hardware the produced records do not further identify) and told the dispatcher not to be confused about who was in the air: “The thing is they’re not gonna see ours. They’re gonna see theirs.” Then he gave the unknowns the word that had stuck around county channels all week.5

“What people are gonna be calling on aren’t gonna be us. They’re gonna be the other monsters.”

Where the case went is the point. It moved through the Cape May County Office of Emergency Management to Supervisory Special Agent Jonathan Scott of FBI Newark, from Scott to Christopher Deibert, the Weapons of Mass Destruction Coordinator for FBI Newark, and from Deibert to A/SSA Michael Vangorder at the Bureau’s Counterterrorism Squad 4 Fusion cell.

On December 18, 2024, FBI Newark co-signed the public assessment: no threat to public safety, no evidence of malicious activity, no caveats. The same afternoon, hours later, Cape May County forwarded Middle Township's electromagnetic-interference (EMI) data up to SSA Scott at FBI Newark, who sent it to Deibert at the WMD desk under the subject line “13DEC Potential EMI Flight.” The public assessment does not mention it.

Two explanations circulated for what happened over New Jersey in November and December 2024. The first came from the federal podium: no threat. The second came from the press and from anyone reaching for the next likely answer: foreign intelligence, adversary drones, or social contagion. The government's own paper contradicts the first: Counterterrorism Squad 4, the WMD desk, a CBRNE (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive) protocol. And the behavior in the record contradicts the second: lit airframes that went dark on cue, drones that paced patrol cars, and a police drone’s own log recording another aircraft jamming it.

Built for the Wrong Threat

Johnston Drive runs up the eastern flank of the Second Watchung Mountain in Watchung Borough, Somerset County, topping out near a county radio tower with the ridge looking east across Newark, the Meadowlands, and Manhattan twenty-two miles out. Between November 23 and December 12, Patrolman Zachary Woods of the Watchung Borough Police Department logged forty drone calls along it. The CAD log, produced under OPRA, has them numbered. The same road runs about one comparable call a year (drone-related calls; the Watchung CAD does not log a comparable category before the wave window).

Forty calls to one tower road in twenty days has the shape of what analysts call ISR: intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance. Its defining property is persistence, the same operators returning to the same target for as long as collection runs. The CAD log counts calls, not confirmed unique platforms; whether this represents one persistent operator or overlapping sightings by different residents, the data do not say.

The public word was no threat. The internal response was a Counterterrorism Squad 4 working group. FBI Newark’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Coordinator authored the counter-drone guidance; the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office pushed it out to police in seventeen municipalities across the county. The Bureau’s Crisis Response Group was notified. The Joint Terrorism Task Force was engaged. Meanwhile, in the same weeks, two Jefferson Township officers at Saffins Pond Dam (featured in Part 1) reported portable radios going dead during a drone sighting and the agencies running the CBRNE cells did not have a protocol for that.

What the Officers Said It Looked Like

The on-the-ground accounts that did exist came from the officers themselves, and they pointed at something military. Over Trenton-Mercer Airport on the night of November 26, three weeks before the Bureau’s public no-threat assessment, NJSP Regional Operations and Intelligence Center (ROIC) Sergeant Batista called Mercer County dispatch and described the inbound traffic as “large, expensive drones possibly carrying additional drones with them.” The call routed to ATC Brandon Dominguez, the same Trenton-Mercer controller who took the NJSP helicopter's 5,200-foot Lakehurst report in Part 1. Dominguez had nothing on his scope at 9:24 PM. By 9:55 he had logged three more drones near the New Jersey State House six miles away. Inside the next six and a half hours, a second tower controller put one to two drones at 200 to 500 feet near the active runway approach, an NJSP detective saw a drone at roughly 200 feet over the terminal heading toward Capital Health Hopewell, and Trenton Police Det. Garzio on scene told the responding Mercer County Sheriff's deputies the objects had “fixed wings and motors” and, in his estimation, “can jam signals”: an on-scene officer’s read, not a technical finding. Airport operations watched the radar for two and a half hours and saw nothing on it.

Two unidentified State Police troopers were parked on Scotch Road that same night in an unmarked white BMW X5. They were already on scene when the Mercer County deputies arrived, and briefed them on what they had seen. They put it bluntly: these were not typical “toy drones” but “more like fixed wing military style UAVs that can carry ordinance [sic] or objects.”

Southbound & Shadowed

NJ Transit Train 3947, southbound out of Edison at 5:20 PM on Friday, December 13, was a Northeast Corridor commuter run with a rush-hour load. For the next forty-three minutes, two to three drones held station with it, matching the train's speed and direction, through New Brunswick, Princeton Junction, Trenton, and across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania at track speed, covering roughly thirty-five rail miles. The conductor and crew watched them. When the train reached Morrisville Yard, on the Pennsylvania side of the river opposite Trenton, at 6:03 PM, three more large drones were already there, called in from a 215 area code, all of it logged inside NJ Transit Police Case 2412L4049. The case narrative is the sole source for the formation; no passenger or crew interview and no FAA record appear in the corpus to confirm it independently. A southbound commuter train holding a drone formation across a state line for forty-three minutes is not a hobbyist signature; it is the one incident in the corpus where a drone crossed a state line while actively following a moving vehicle.

A large share of the 7,147 incidents in the corpus (the database of New Jersey drone reports I assembled from public-records requests) are aircraft, planets, recreational drones, and curious hobbyists hovering near houses. That much is real. But hobbyists do not jam a police drone’s flight, hold formation on a Northeast Corridor train for forty-three minutes across a state line, or give a control tower four objects it can see through the windows and nothing on the radar. And hobbyists, by federal rule, broadcast a Remote ID signal (a radio identifier nearly every registered drone must transmit). Most patrol reports do not document whether scanning was attempted; the one report that records a scan recorded no signal at all.

Too Low to Be Looking

An adversary reconnaissance asset operates above the reach of the ground. The New Jersey drones flew at heights where a shotgun could reach them, where a witness could hear them, where a patrol car's headlights could light them up. The incidents that follow are organized by what they tell, not when they happened; the date stamps are anchors, not a timeline.

The earliest dated incident in this OPRA corpus came in on the night of November 1, before the wave had any national profile at all. A resident of Delaware Township in rural Hunterdon County, in the western part of the state along the Pennsylvania border, called police just before midnight. The CAD entry is not “drone overhead” or “drone in the area.” It reads drone flying and looking in her window. It hovered outside for a few seconds and left, eastbound. She called again two nights later: three more, same address, with a dispatcher’s note that there was a history of this happening.6

Patrolman Nicholas Lisa of the West Milford Police Department, in the wooded northwest of Passaic County, printed a photograph of a U.S. military Puma drone and stapled it to his own incident report, because that was the airframe his memory matched. The night before, on December 1 just after midnight, he had pulled over near Oak Ridge Reservoir and counted at least eleven craft drifting over the reservoir's outer perimeter and its dam over the next five hours; Lisa estimated their altitude at 350 to 500 feet above the ground. Holding 350 feet over a reservoir for five hours is not standoff altitude either (the safe height a surveillance drone keeps to stay out of sight and out of range). It is a ground-level observation record, not a technical identification, and it is the one report in the corpus where a trained officer matched what he saw to a specific military airframe.

Lit, Then Dark

A real ISR asset hides. The New Jersey drones ran lit. The record carries three incidents within eight days where they did not stay lit.7 Red and green lights are standard aircraft navigation lighting, normal on anything that flies; what the reports flag is not the color but the behavior: lights on, then suddenly off.

The boring read for any light cut is an operator throttling back before landing or ending a flight; the behavior becomes notable only when the timing matches what the officers describe: lights that went dark the moment the craft was seen or approached. A skeptic can also read “lit until observed, then dark” as consistent with an asset that does not care about detection until it matters; Long Hill and Bernards are consistent with that read. West Amwell, where the lights extinguished as a private citizen raised a phone, is suggestive in the other direction, but a single coincidence the report does not explain is not a refutation by itself. What the three incidents together do is weaken the hypothesis of a disciplined covert reconnaissance program. They do not, on their own, rule out a sloppy, brazen, or provocative operation that flies lit and goes dark when looked at.

At 2:23 AM on November 30, Patrolman Napolitano of the Long Hill Township police, a small Morris County town along the Passaic River, was on Long Hill Road when a drone with red, green, and white lights came up alongside his patrol car and matched his direction. It held over the intersection he was turning toward for about ten seconds. Then every light on the drone went out at once and it was gone. His sergeant corroborated it. By sunrise the FBI, the Secret Service, and the FAA had all been notified. A reconnaissance asset does not break off to shadow one patrol car at two in the morning and kill its lights the moment a cop looks at it.

Six days later, in Bernards Township, a 911 caller on Potomac Drive reported a small flight of triangle-shaped craft with red and green lights overhead, and while he was still on the line the dispatcher caught the next moment in his own typing, in capitals: THE DRONES BLACKED OUT.8 A week after that, on Route 31 in West Amwell along the Delaware River south of Frenchtown, a resident lifted his phone to photograph what was over his property, and the lights extinguished.9

What the Instruments Missed

At 6:24 PM on December 6, the controllers in the tower at Essex County Airport, a public general-aviation field in Fairfield, about twenty miles west of Manhattan, were looking at two things at once. Out the windows: four drones over the field. On the radar built to find aircraft over that field: nothing. Four objects they could see, none of them showing on the scope.

The boring explanation is real: small drones can sit under a radar's detection floor. The characterization in the West Caldwell police report, attributed to the tower staff, was sharper: the absence was the work of “sophisticated radar jamming technology.” That phrase is the controllers' on-scene reaction, not a signals analysis. What is not in dispute is the split screen: trained aviation professionals, four objects in the glass, an empty scope.

Two nights later, Mercer County. On December 8, Sergeant Coderoni of the Mercer County Sheriff’s Office watched a rotary drone the size of a truck hold at 400 to 500 feet over the Trenton-Mercer Airport terminal. It was not on the airport’s radar either. A Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) went out, and an NJSP helicopter sweep of the airspace came back empty.

The Saffins Pond Dam radio loss that opened Part 1 is the same family of finding: two Jefferson Township officers standing on a Morris County reservoir dam in early December, a thermal figure in the woods nearby, the dispatch line that should have worked and didn’t, a target they could not get a callsign through to anyone about.

One incident that often gets stacked next to the radar gap belongs in a different file. The night before, December 7, the Ocean County Sheriff's drone team was on patrol when an unidentified object crossed their line of sight, and they put a DJI Matrice (a large police surveillance drone) on it. The clip the sheriff would later describe on television as a drone with little to no thermal signature is that one. The version OCSO released is trimmed; the first three seconds and the last three seconds are gone. What survives is the middle. The trimmed seconds do not bear on the identification: United Airlines flight UA1473 was on a published approach (a standard charted flight path into an airport) across the full window, including the seconds OCSO removed. The agency's own AirData flight-track export (AirData is the service that stores DJI drone flight logs), run against ADS-B for the same window, matches that flight, registration N37534, on its approach to Newark. The object the camera was tracking was a commercial airliner at altitude.

Author's debunk walkthrough: the OCSO Dec 7 flight track cross-referenced against ADS-B for United Airlines flight UA1473 on a published approach. The aerial object the sheriff's drone was painting on optical and characterizing as ‘little or no thermal signature’ was a commercial airliner at altitude.

ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast) is the transponder signal a commercial airliner broadcasts to air-traffic control: mandatory at altitude, optional in the low sky, and waivable for military and law-enforcement flights. Remote ID is the civilian-drone equivalent, required of nearly every registered drone since March 16, 2024. Flying a civilian drone dark requires a Part 107 waiver from the FAA; an open FOIA seeks the list of who held one over New Jersey in the wave window. On December 6, Patrolman Sosnowski of the Freehold Township police ran a Remote ID receiver beside a Jersey Central Power and Light (JCP&L) substation and a National Guard armory during an active sighting. It returned nothing. The corpus does not establish that Remote ID scanning was systematic; most patrol reports do not document whether it was attempted. Freehold Township is the one place where a scan was attempted and recorded as null.

What those gaps share is not proof of capability. They are a pattern: the instruments that were supposed to tell New Jersey what was over it returned nothing.

The Shape of a Recovery

On December 7, a Lebanon Borough resident (a small Hunterdon County borough beside Round Valley Reservoir) called the State Police to report a drone that had come down in the woods along a property line. Eleven troopers responded out of NJSP's Hope Barracks, primary unit Trooper William Riepe with ten assisting, disposition REPORT WRITTEN. That is the bureaucratic shape of a real effort to find and recover a downed drone: a drone-down call answered by a primary unit and ten assisting, NJSP NorthSTAR (the State Police helicopter with a searchlight) pulled in to spotlight the woods. The State Police weekly summary for the same window carries one Oak Ridge entry: unidentified subject flew and landed a drone near multiple critical infrastructure sites. Sectors, energy and water. Disposition, under FBI review. What the produced records do not show is the next page. A drone-down call is not a drone down. Neither file carries a found abandoned or a recovered by owner disposition; neither carries a chain-of-custody entry. The state turned out the heavy units twice in one week. What hit the ground, if anything, is not in the file.

No Responsive Material

On the night of December 11, 2024, in Chatham Township in Morris County, a resident on Meyersville Road called 911 twice from a house that backs onto the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, 7,800 acres of federally protected wetland and woods straddling the Morris–Somerset line. The first call came at 7:44 PM, the second at 11:35 PM. She reported white lights and purple strobes low over her backyard, near the wood line.

After the second call, Officer Colette Murphy, on scene, reported watching a large unmanned aircraft lift out of the woods behind the property; her observation is recorded inside McGrath's incident report, not in a separate statement. So the department put up its own drone. Chatham's certified drone operator, Brian McGrath, launched it from the driveway at 11:51 PM (he stayed on the ground; the FAA calls that ground-based role the "pilot in command"). The AirData flight log, produced under OPRA after a supplemental request, runs fifteen minutes: a climb to 469 feet within ninety seconds, a nine-minute arc to the northwest toward the wood line the caller had described. Not a hover: a working pursuit across the wood line. The drone landed at 12:06 AM.10

The drone's onboard summary, on the same AirData export, says it recorded nothing: zero videos, zero photos.

The OPRA production did return media from the case file: five short clips the household had recorded on phones across the two calls. One is published below, at its native phone-camera resolution, with a caveat about the camera. The Chatham Township PD drone flying overhead recorded nothing that came back to the requester.

The Township's written answer for what that camera produced over those fifteen minutes is three words, consistent with the AirData summary above.

No responsive material.

That answer is honest to the data.

The log says it did not record. The Township has not said why, and I am not going to guess.

• • •

That is not the shape of a foreign reconnaissance operation. It is also not the shape of a coverup. It is the shape of a state working in good faith on something it could not name. The clearest proof is the document the response was built around. Thirteen months after it went out, after assembling the incident corpus, I asked the New Jersey Division of Fire Safety for the records behind it. The answer was a different document than the one on its face.

The Fire Threat Task Force (FTTF) functions as the Division’s counterterrorism intelligence distribution arm. It is the channel through which New Jersey’s fire service receives FDNY Watchline reports, federal EMR-ISAC bulletins, and threat products distributed by the State Police regional intelligence center. Its distribution list, produced under OPRA, runs to 716 addresses, from the fire chiefs of New Jersey municipalities to federal partners at the Coast Guard, the Army, the Air Force, the National Park Service, and Veterans Affairs.

Intelligence Bulletin 24-1 went out on December 12, 2024, on FTTF letterhead, six days before the Bureau’s public no-threat assessment. The protocol called for self-contained breathing apparatus, a 330-foot isolation zone, a bomb squad, and radiation monitoring in response to a downed drone: the CBRNE playbook for a dirty bomb. Its face stated, on the line below the title:

“The NJ Division of Fire Safety has developed several guidelines when encountering downed Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) in collaboration with the NJSP & FBI Newark office.”

I asked the Division for the records behind that collaboration. The briefing documents FBI Newark sent. The guidance NJSP provided. The drafts, the meeting notes, the correspondence, the names of who from either agency took part. The Division answered, in writing, item by item. Internal emails or notes discussing the bulletin’s development: none. Drafts showing FBI or State Police input: none. Correspondence coordinating the collaboration: none. Records of who from FBI or State Police was involved: none. The bulletin, the Division wrote, was developed “from open source information readily available from numerous sources, including but not limited to FBI/NJSP websites and the Emergency Response Guidebook… was just a consolidation of such.” The “in collaboration with” line on the face, the Division confirmed, referred to “the use of publicly available information from those agencies’ websites, rather than direct coordination, input, or review by FBI/NJSP personnel.”

Then the last item I asked about. Any incident reports or notifications received by the Division of Fire Safety regarding downed, crashed, or recovered drones in New Jersey. The Division is not a law-enforcement operations center; it does not receive State Police CAD entries in real time. But the protocol it published called for bomb squads and radiation monitoring in response to a downed drone, a recovery event, not a fire. The Division answered: “No reportable incident reports were made to the Division of Fire Safety to the best of our knowledge.” The Lebanon Borough tasking that pulled NJSP NorthSTAR to the woods on December 7, eleven troopers out of Hope Barracks responding to a drone-down call, did not reach it. The Oak Ridge entry from the State Police weekly summary, an unidentified subject who “flew and landed a drone near multiple critical infrastructure sites” in sectors energy and water, was under FBI review; no notification to the Division appears in the produced records. That the agency that wrote the recovery protocol had no record of a recovery is the gap.

Three weeks into a wave nobody could identify, the Division reached for the only book in its entire fire-service library that had ever addressed the category. One line in the protocol did not come from a website. Recommendation 8 (one of eight numbered items on the bulletin) warned that electronic devices and two-way radios might malfunction in the immediate area, the one part of the bulletin that matched what officers were actually reporting from the field. It was not in the chemical guide the bulletin cited, and it was not on the agency webpages. Asked where it came from, the Division answered plainly: “the textbook, ’The Fire Officers Guide to Disaster Control’, Chapter 13.” The 1992 second edition, by Kramer and Bahme. Chapter 13 is titled “Enemy Attack and UFO Potential.” The fire service told the truth about all of it. Every question I put to the Division it answered, in writing, without hedging. The contradiction is not theirs. It is the document’s, and the document is an institutional artifact, written under conditions no one had a manual for.

A Middle Township corporal called them the “other monsters” on a recorded line on December 13. The FBI called them no threat to public safety a few days later. Between those two phrases is a state that stood up its gravest apparatus for something it could not name and could not find on the ground. It had one reference: one book on one shelf that had ever contemplated the category. The wave was too capable to be nothing. The record it left behind is too strange to be spies.

Phantom Swarm is a documents-driven, reader-supported investigation. Subscribe to get the next parts in your inbox.

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A note on AI: This project uses AI. AI helped write this article. AI drafted the OPRA template, built the filing pipeline, drafted my replies to custodians, and built the knowledge graph that indexes the 13,500 returned documents. I reviewed the documents and videos the AI flagged as interesting. Filings went out under my name and signature. The documents are real. Every one is a government record produced under a public-records request.

Right of reply. Before publication, courtesy notices were sent to FBI Newark Public Affairs, the New Jersey State Police Public Information Office, the New Jersey Division of Fire Safety, NJOHSP Communications, the Ocean County Sheriff’s Office, the Mercer County Sheriff’s Office, and to the chiefs of the Middle Township, Chatham Township, Watchung Borough, Long Hill Township, West Milford, Freehold Township, and Bernards Township police departments. Responses received by publication will be appended here. Corrections: jmalaska@gmail.com.

Correction (August 11, 2026): The opening section originally reported that ADS-B Exchange showed no aircraft broadcasting within three miles of the launch point at any altitude, and that the nearest was a Cessna at 2,700 feet more than five miles away. Both statements were wrong. Six aircraft came within three miles during the flight, and the Cessna in question was about four and a third miles off and was not the nearest. A United States Air Force C-17 descended to 2,250 feet and closed to two and a half miles while the drone was airborne, which is very likely what the drone’s collision alert was reading. The passage has been rewritten. Footnote 1 originally said a consultant confirmed the drone was jammed by an unknown aircraft; the consultant assessed a possible EMI event on the 2.4/5.8 GHz bands and ruled out any EMI effect on GPS, and nothing in the record attributes a cause. That footnote has been rewritten. The flight time and the event sequence have also been distinguished: seventy-eight seconds of alerts inside a flight of seven minutes and ten seconds.

Corrected August 10, 2026. A helicopter flight described here as a night flight was a morning flight, and the 911 calls quoted alongside it came in that evening. See Corrections at the end.

Previously in Phantom Swarm: Part 1 traced the federal "no credible threat" line against what 626 OPRA requests and 13,500 documents showed about the November-December 2024 drone wave over New Jersey.1 Part 2 begins with what the cops wrote down before the country knew there was a story.

What this investigation found: Between mid-November and mid-December 2024, New Jersey police records document a federal mobilization the public never saw. Ninety-nine drone reports stamped Pursued Federally. Five days later, the federal podium said no credible threat. What happened to those ninety-nine has not been disclosed.

The Headline Was Picatinny

The first drone of the wave to reach the trade press appeared over Picatinny Arsenal. A contractor saw it on the night of Wednesday, November 13, 2024. The arsenal's spokesman, Eric Kowal, told the local press the FBI were the experts and that the post did not believe there to be a threat at this juncture. By Thursday and Friday of the following week, the story was running in the trade and aviation press. That was the public version.

For five days, no one typed Trump’s name in any internal police record that this OPRA corpus has surfaced. He had just won the presidency, and the question of when he would return to his New Jersey golf course was already circulating at the state OEM level.

Rogue Drone Flights

At 6:41 PM on Monday, November 18, 2024, two hours after sunset in central New Jersey, Captain Sherif Zaiton of the Watchung Police Department typed two words into the subject line of an internal email: Rogue Drone Flights. He addressed the email to WPD-AllMembers, every officer in the department. His explanation was a single sentence: “Due to the nature of President-elect Trump frequenting our county.” Every officer was told to notify the captain directly with anything they saw. Watchung is a small borough in Somerset County, the same county that contains Donald Trump’s Bedminster golf course. The email is the earliest written internal police record of the New Jersey drone wave that the Open Public Records Act (OPRA) corpus assembled for this series has surfaced. Zaiton, reached for comment in May 2026, confirmed the email was an internal memo asking WPD members to route any drone reports up to him; it was his responsibility, he wrote, to pass that information up to the county level.

Howard Altman first reported the Zaiton memo for The War Zone. What follows builds out from there.

Ninety-two minutes later, at 8:13 PM, a Somerville PD dispatcher opened a new incident. The reporting party was not a civilian. It was Trooper Sabatella of the New Jersey State Police’s Regional Operations and Intelligence Center (ROIC), the state’s twenty-four-hour intelligence fusion desk. The dispatcher’s verbatim CAD note read:

LOOKING TO SPEAK WITH SGT ABOUT UNIDENTIFIED DRONES POSSIBLY FLYING IN SOMERVILLE // ADV ITS NOT EMERGENT AND WILL WAIT UNTIL SGT IS CLEAR FROM CURRENT CALL.

A minute later the dispatcher added a second entry: “LOOKING FOR PHONE CALL.” Officer Ryan Kreideweis was dispatched; the incident cleared eight minutes after it opened. The state’s word for the drones, in writing, on day one, was UNIDENTIFIED.

Two Roads, Six Drones

Lamington Road runs along the northern edge of Trump National's fairways. The next evening, Tuesday, November 19, at 5:33 PM, Sergeant Noah Benson of the Bedminster Township Police Department was standing on it, counting at least five aircraft with red and blue strobe lights over the President-elect's golf course. The federal government would not restrict the airspace until three days later. The CAD entry stayed open for thirty-two minutes.2

Trump had not been to the Bedminster property since August 15, when he held a campaign news conference there. The drones were over his New Jersey golf club anyway.

The next night, Wednesday, November 20, the drones moved north. Sgt. Benson was back on a different road in the same township when he raised Bedminster’s Office of Emergency Management Coordinator, Chris Crowell, on the radio. Crowell was in his own vehicle on a different street in the same town. He told Benson he was looking at three drones of his own, hovering over the township firehouse and the township police headquarters at 55 Miller Lane, just over a mile northeast of Trump National. Two municipal officials, two roads, six drones, two nights in a row, all inside Bedminster Township.

The FBI was already on it. On the morning of Tuesday, November 19, hours before Benson would stand on Lamington Road, Sgt. Benjamin Griffin of the Raritan Borough Police Department’s Detective Bureau, the department’s Emergency Management Coordinator and the man whose job is to escalate threats up the chain, sent his department a 6:15 AM alert: if anyone saw large or multiple drones over the borough, notify him immediately, the state OEM had a “huge issue” the night before and needed to know. Griffin closed with one line: “They especially have concerns with POTUS coming to NJ.”

That afternoon at 4:52 PM, Griffin sent a longer follow-up to the same internal list. He had been briefed by the New Jersey State Police OEM and the Somerset County OEM. The briefing inventoried where the drones had been the night before: Somerville’s Police Station, the hospital, communications towers, Trump Golf Course, and last sighted at Picatinny Arsenal. The NJSP/OEM briefers asserted, in language Griffin was relaying, that the drones were not regular drones and had a battery life of at least six hours. No subsequent technical analysis in the documents released through this OPRA campaign has independently verified the six-hour figure. They had been sighted between dusk and dawn. State Police guidance: if a drone lands, treat it as a bomb and notify the bomb squad. Then the line that runs the rest of the morning: “Do not spread information about this at this time, the FBI took it on as a case and is actively investigating.”3

Sgt. Griffin sent that on his own department email on November 19, naming the President-elect’s New Jersey travel as the federal driver and the FBI as the lead. The FAA would not carve a hole in the airspace over Trump National for three more days.4

By the morning of Thursday, November 21, four levels of agency were briefing Bedminster’s police chief. Police Chief Francesco Bernardo replied to a 7:16 AM email from a township official and named them as a category: “federal, state, county, and local.” He named the officer attending the briefing with him: Captain Thomas Polito of the Bedminster Township Police Department. He did not name the federal agency. The day before, Sgt. Griffin’s 4:52 PM briefing on the same wave had named the FBI as case lead. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Newark Field Office, was running the New Jersey case.567

Across the OPRA records the series draws on, at least thirty individually documented FBI-affiliated personnel were operating across six FBI organizational components in New Jersey during the wave: twenty-three named agents, three Joint Terrorism Task Force officers, and four identified only by badge or partial name. The six components: the Newark Field Office, the Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG) Counter-small-Unmanned-Aircraft-System Team, the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate’s small-UAS team, the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF, Newark CT-2 plus the Middlesex and South Jersey teams), the Office of Partner Engagement, and the Office of Private Sector. The CIRG and WMDD team rosters were never publicly produced. The federal government has not disclosed how many agents staffed the 5,000-tip pipeline reported in the FBI Public Safety Awareness Report of December 18, 2024.8

In Bernardo’s own words:

“As per the FBI, we are not to issue any press releases. I also don’t want to discuss this in any TC meetings because it could have national security implications and there would be nothing that I could disclose anyway.”9

"TC" is not defined in the November 21 email. Bernardo’s own December 5 follow-up does the work. Asked by Committeewoman Renee Mareski whether the Chief could "address at the next TC," Bernardo replied: "If the Twp Committe [sic] wants to discuss it that is up to you but understand I will not be providing any information." TC is the Township Committee, the five-member elected body that meets monthly under the New Jersey Open Public Meetings Act (N.J.S.A. 10:4-6 et seq.).

The Bedminster Police records establish FBI direction, in Bernardo's own words. The Secret Service is not named in the file. Standard FBI protocol during an active investigation is to hold public comment to avoid compromising the case; the records establish that Bernardo stayed silent, not whether the silence was investigative caution or something else. The transition team and the President-elect said nothing publicly for the next twenty-five days.

While Bernardo’s department was being told to stay silent, a different instruction was traveling south, to Atlantic County. On Friday, November 22, at 10:27 AM, Detective Sergeant Kevin Brady #161 of the Ventnor City Police Department, in Atlantic County, sent the entire sworn staff of his department a Request for Information email relaying what the JTTF and FBI had been telling local agencies in the preceding weeks:

"Within recent weeks the JTTF and FBI have been receiving reports of suspicious UAS/Drone activity... reports indicate the activity is beyond hobbyist capability and at least one report indicates the UAS/Drone went completely 'dark' making any identification methods nearly impossible."10

The directive at the bottom of the email was operational: file Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) reports, notify the on-call detective, attach the FBI/JTTF flyer. The framing was the part that mattered. Five days before Thanksgiving, the federal task force was already telling sworn officers in another county that the activity was beyond hobbyist capabilities and that at least one airframe had been observed going dark when approached by a law-enforcement aircraft.11

One day after Bernardo’s email, on Friday, November 22, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a two-week Temporary Flight Restriction (TFR) over Trump National running through December 6. Three days after that, on Monday, November 25, it added a month-long restriction over Picatinny Arsenal in Rockaway Township (NOTAM FDC 4/8833), about seventeen nautical miles north, running through December 26. Both cited "Special Security Reasons," the only public-facing rationale the FAA listed, with no accompanying press release from the FAA, the White House, the Trump Organization, or the Trump-Vance transition team explaining what triggered them.1213

The night after the first FAA restriction took effect, on Saturday, November 23, in Harding Township, a resident called 911 about a “loud bang.” Within eleven minutes, a uniformed officer separately observed a drone with green and red lights over Spring Brook Country Club. Whether the bang and the sighting were related is not established in the Harding records. Within an hour, the FBI Newark's CIRG had been notified; the four-agent response was confirmed in the CAD at the seventy-five-minute mark, and the State Police's NorthSTAR helicopter, the NJSP aviation unit's primary medevac and tactical airframe, was airborne. All police drones were grounded as manned aviation took over. The case closed at 2:58 AM with no operator identifie”

The Trump National prohibition ran in continuous effect from November 22 through January 31, 2025, two extensions folded into each other without a gap.14 The drones did not stop. Plotted against the prohibited airspace, the Bedminster Township Police CAD log shows more than a dozen drone-related entries inside or directly adjacent to the TFR circle during the wave window, several of them at the clubhouse address at 900 Lamington Road. FAA enforcement actions live in federal records, not state OPRA productions; the absence in this corpus reflects the filing method, not a definitive federal record.15

Special Security Reasons

The two TFRs cut identical airspace out for two sites about seventeen nautical miles apart, but the drone activity was not confined to those two sites. By the first week of December, the geography of the records had a shape: Picatinny at the top, Trump National at the southeast corner, the Round Valley Reservoir at the southwest, centered over Lebanon Township in Hunterdon County.16

Hunterdon is the smallest of the three corridor counties (Hunterdon, Somerset, Morris) by population (U.S. Census 2024 estimate, roughly 130,000). Its per-capita incident rate in the OPRA corpus assembled for this series is the highest of the three.17 The corpus is a record of what was filed for and what was returned, not an unbiased sample of drone activity, so the per-capita signal is part coverage and part activity. Most of its records cluster on or adjacent to Interstate 78.18

Round Valley Reservoir holds fifty-five billion gallons.19 It is the largest reservoir in New Jersey, the headworks of the Raritan Basin system that supplies drinking water to roughly two million people in the central part of the state, operated by the New Jersey Water Supply Authority under the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Drone activity over the reservoir was logged on at least five nights between December 1 and December 8, in NJSP ROIC daily reports and Lebanon Borough CADs released via OPRA.20

Six Records, One Night

One Saturday evening at Round Valley, six different filing chains produced paperwork about the same ninety-minute window: two 911 calls in Lebanon Borough,21 a State Police escalation chain,22 a public Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) trace of an NJSP helicopter overhead,23 an internal email from the Water Supply Authority resolving one strand of the civilian reports,24 and a next-morning incident narrative from a neighboring township.25 Most of those chains were not in contact with each other. None of them required the others to make sense.

On Saturday, December 7, at 5:14 PM, a Lebanon Borough resident roughly one and a half miles from Round Valley called 911 to report a drone down in the woods near his home and a drone circling at the top of the ridge. Troopers were dispatched within minutes and NJSP NorthSTAR was requested. Nine minutes later, a second resident called from Brunswick Avenue on the south side of the reservoir. County dispatch handed her the FBI tip line. Over the next two hours the response escalated: NJSP Captain Foschetti to the Perryville Station, ROIC Lieutenant Spaanstra to the field, the Electronic Surveillance Unit notified, an Emergency Response Vehicle drone operator dispatched. A state trooper requested NJ Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) assistance for a downed-drone search.

NJSP helicopter N9NJ held a forty-seven-and-a-half-minute loiter pattern over Round Valley Reservoir, mostly along its northern shore, while those dispatch records were active.26 The next morning, an unrelated call to 46 Old Mountain Road in Clinton Township was logged in the responding officer’s incident narrative: “NJSP was in the area doing surveillance from last night’s reported downed drone.”

One of the records resolves cleanly. The New Jersey Water Supply Authority operates an inspection drone of its own. NJWSA patroller Bill Gumulak emailed a colleague at the Department of Environmental Protection that week to identify himself in a civilian video forwarded to the agency: “the video from the patron was of me. I was out on patrol that night, taking thermal images of the dams.”27Gumulak’s email accounts for some civilian sightings of lights over the dam structures that week. It does not account for the 5:14 PM call about a downed drone in the woods, the second resident’s call from the rear of the reservoir, the FBI tip-line handoff, the Electronic Surveillance Unit deployment, the DEP downed-drone-search request, or the forty-seven-and-a-half-minute helicopter loiter that began at 6:19 PM.2829 The NJWSA production does not include Gumulak’s flight logs; the email confirms the patrols, not the specific hour.

The helicopter was back up on Sunday morning. At 8:50 AM on December 8, N9NJ lifted off again, and ADS-B records show it flying a backwards-C track along the eastern shore of Round Valley, sweeping back and forth multiple times in what looks, to a non-aviator reading the trace, like a search pattern; the State Police mission profile records that would describe the flight on its own terms remain in OPRA litigation. The same airframe then tracked east, out of Hunterdon County and into Somerset County, passing close to Trump National Bedminster before it landed at 9:46.30 The Bedminster ground records from later that day are dense. A Lamington Road caller, at 8:12 PM, reported a dozen drones over the hills and the library and down Lamington Road. A second caller, eight minutes earlier, had been on the line about red, white, and green lights flying just above the treetops.

The federal critical-infrastructure layer arrived last. On December 13 and 14, the New Jersey State Police deployed counter-drone detection equipment to the Round Valley North Dam. Between December 14 and December 22, the FBI had a Counter-UAS team in New Jersey alongside NJSP. On December 16, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security component charged with protecting the nation's critical infrastructure, sent a Region II Protective Security Advisor named Daniel Schultz to email NJWSA's Executive Director, Marc Brooks. CISA is the country's top civilian agency for defending power grids, water systems, and pipelines from physical and cyber attack. The question Schultz raised on the record was whether the FAA should be asked to close the airspace over the largest drinking-water reservoir in the state. No earlier formal written CISA engagement with NJWSA about Round Valley appears in the documents NJWSA produced. Civilian 911 calls about drones over the reservoir had started fifteen days earlier. The same federal agency that had carved a flight prohibition out around a private golf course twenty-four days earlier was, on December 16, still asking whether to do the same for the headworks of central New Jersey's drinking water. 

The records that would specify the State Police aviation mission profile through the corridor are the subject of pending OPRA litigation as of publication.

Critical Infrastructure

The corridor wasn't the whole map. While Zaiton was typing his Watchung memo that Monday evening, eight miles to the west, at roughly 6:00 PM, Somerville's OEM coordinator Jason Kraska was watching six commercial-grade drones over 110 Rehill Avenue, the helipad campus of Somerset Medical Center. Lieutenant Darrin DiPalma of the Somerville PD took the call. The state's own New Jersey Suspicious Activity Reporting System (NJSARS) Weekly Summary later catalogued the incident under sector Healthcare. Disposition: Pursued Federally. In NJSARS reporting, “Pursued Federally” is a case-routing designation: a federal agency, in most instances the FBI, accepted the referral. It does not by itself signal a threat determination. It says who has the file, not what is in it. By December 13, 2024, the joint intelligence product co-authored by the NJ ROIC, the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness (NJOHSP), and the FBI Newark Field Office recorded the running total: 113 drone-related NJSARS reports since November 18, 99 of them pursued federally.

On Sunday, November 24, the geography reached the grid. The NJSARS Weekly Summary for the week ending that Sunday catalogued a drone operating over the high-tension JCP&L (Jersey Central Power and Light) power lines feeding a Sussex County substation in Andover Township. NJSARS classification: Aviation Activity / Energy and Utilities. Disposition: Pursued Federally. The Sussex County Prosecutor's later retrospective bulletin listed Andover and Newton Medical Center as anchor sites of its first-week timeline.

Three weeks later, on December 12 at 9:23 AM, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities Duty Officer forwarded a photograph from JCP&L to nine staff inside the agency's Division of Reliability and Security. The subject line named the location: JCP&L Drone Picture, taken over the West Wharton substation.

At 8:02 PM on Friday, December 13, Lieutenant Christopher Pietsch of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory’s Site Protection Division called Plainsboro Township police dispatch. He had eleven drones in his airspace.

The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, at 100 Stellarator Road in Plainsboro, is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory for plasma physics and fusion energy research. Princeton University runs the site under DOE contract. The lab’s fusion research hardware is subject to Department of Energy physical security requirements.

Pietsch reported approximately eleven fixed-wing drones with red and green lights over the campus. Five of them crossed what the Plainsboro PD CAD entry recorded as “federal restricted air space,” Pietsch’s shorthand for the DOE site-security perimeter; no FAA flight restriction over PPPL would exist until December 18, five days later, when the FAA placed the lab inside a twenty-three-site critical-infrastructure UAS restriction.

The drones stayed for twenty to twenty-five minutes. At one point, five passed within one hundred to two hundred yards of personnel and experimental structures. Sergeant D. Kanaley #756 and Officer Cancel of the Plainsboro Township Police Department responded. At 9:13 PM, Kanaley stopped a white Audi at Scudders Mill Road and Campus Road near the campus perimeter. One occupant. The traffic stop is in the CAD; the substance of the conversation is not. The case was cleared at 11:30 PM.

The NJSARS sector for the incident was filed as Nuclear Facilities. Disposition: Under FBI Review.

By mid-December the corpus had logged drone activity at a President-elect’s golf club, a military arsenal, the state’s largest drinking water reservoir, a Department of Energy national laboratory, and the Salem and Hope Creek nuclear stations, cutting across multiple categories of federally-sensitive site. The federal record had it both ways the same week.

On December 12, at the White House podium, National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby said there was no credible threat. Many of the reported sightings, he said, appeared to be manned aircraft operating lawfully.

On December 13, the joint NJ ROIC / NJOHSP / FBI Newark intelligence daily report logged 99 NJSARS sightings stamped Pursued Federally since November 18. Co-authored. U//FOUO. Not for public release.

On December 16, CISA Region II Protective Security Advisor Daniel Schultz was still on email with the New Jersey Water Supply Authority asking whether the FAA should close the airspace over the largest drinking water reservoir in the state. Civilian 911 calls about drones over the reservoir had started fifteen days earlier.

On December 18, the FAA closed airspace over twenty-three New Jersey critical-infrastructure sites, running through January 17. The same day, the FBI Public Safety Awareness Report, co-signed by the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, said no credible threat. Twenty-three flight prohibitions for manned aircraft operating lawfully, a Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate co-signature for hobbyists, an active CISA correspondence about the headworks of central New Jersey’s drinking water for a wave that posed no threat to public safety. The federal actions and the federal words describe two different problems.

Three weeks before the federal record resolved itself, on December 5 at 10:33 PM, a Lincoln Park Borough dispatcher said: “According to them it’s not a threat or anything. So why are we reporting if it’s not a threat then?”

The federal answer, the one in the file, has not been disclosed.

Pursued Federally is where the paper trail ends.

Updated May 20, 2026 to sharpen closing framing. Findings unchanged.

Right of reply. Before publication, on May 7, 2026, I sent courtesy notices by email to FBI Newark Public Affairs, the New Jersey State Police Public Information Office, NJOHSP Communications, CISA Region II, the New Jersey Water Supply Authority, and to the chiefs of the Bedminster Township, Watchung, Raritan Borough, Clinton Township, Jefferson Township, and Ventnor City police departments. Watchung’s Capt. Sherif Zaiton responded with on-the-record context for his Nov. 18 email, which I have incorporated. NJOHSP Communications responded; I followed up with the three questions reflected in the body of this Part: whether NJOHSP has received a final FBI report on the ninety-nine NJSARS referrals pursued federally between November 18 and December 10, 2024; whether NJOHSP has issued a summary report on the wave to the Governor, the Attorney General, or the State Legislature; and the current case-disposition of those ninety-nine referrals. Other responses received by publication will be appended here. Corrections: jmalaska@gmail.com. Correction (June 15, 2026): An earlier version stated the Trump National Bedminster and Picatinny Arsenal TFRs were twelve nautical miles apart and shared the same 1 NM radius / 400 ft AGL geometry. Corrected: the ring centers are about seventeen nautical miles (nineteen statute miles) apart, and the two TFRs were not identical — Bedminster was 1 NM radius, surface to 1000 ft AGL (FDC 4/7952, extended through Jan. 31 as FDC 4/8986); Picatinny was 2 NM radius, surface to 2000 ft AGL (FDC 4/8833). Map image updated to match. Correction (August 10, 2026): This piece originally described a State Police helicopter flight over Round Valley Reservoir on December 8, 2024 as occurring at night, and called it the second of two consecutive nights. That flight was in the morning, from 8:50 to 9:46 AM Eastern. The error came from a flight-tracking tool that renders dates in Coordinated Universal Time rather than local time, the same cutoff the caption on the previous image describes. It also made the paragraph read as though the Bedminster 911 calls quoted just after it came in while the helicopter was overhead. Those calls were logged that evening, at 8:04 and 8:12 PM. The body and the caption have been corrected. Separately, the December 18, 2024 FBI report described here as a Private Sector Advisory Report is a Public Safety Awareness Report. Separately, this piece gave two different counts for the December 18 flight restrictions, twenty-two in one place and twenty-three in another. The New Jersey State Police intelligence center counted twenty-three.

Parts 3, 4, and 5 are still in progress. The records keep coming back. Phantom Swarm is free on Substack, a documents-driven, reader-supported investigation. Subscribe to get the next parts in your inbox.

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A note on AI: This project uses AI as a filing assistant and a document-indexing tool. AI drafted the OPRA template, built the filing pipeline, drafted replies to custodians, and built the knowledge graph that indexes the documents. I read the documents, made all editorial and sourcing decisions, and wrote and revised the prose. AI helped me draft and edit, but every claim in this article rests on a primary record I have read. Filings went out under my name and signature. Every cited document is a government record produced under a public-records request.31

On the night of December 6, 2024, two officers of the Jefferson Township Police Department answered a civilian complaint and headed to Saffins Pond Dam, a remote and heavily wooded stretch of state water infrastructure tucked into the Morris County highlands. Officers Mark Williams (badge 71) and Nolan Ryan (badge 87) arrived and approached on foot, scanning with a thermal scope. Williams picked up a figure on the scope, standing upright near the dam's edge. To the left, near the bridge, was a flashing white light. They walked the perimeter of the lake toward the subject.

As they closed in, their radios went dead. They could not transmit, could not raise anyone at dispatch. When they left the area, the radios came back online. They called for backup. Officers Wojtach and Romash responded. The Morris County Sheriff's Office came out. They searched the dam, the bridge, and the surrounding woods, and found nothing. No person, no device, nothing where Williams's thermal had picked up a figure. A Suspicious Activity Report was submitted via the New Jersey Suspicious Activity Reporting System (NJSARS) portal that night, with Morris County Communications notified.

That is from an official police report, case number 24-47664, filed by the sworn officers themselves and obtained under New Jersey's Open Public Records Act. It is one of roughly 13,500 documents I would end up pulling from all over the state.

Jefferson Twp PD Case 24-47664. Saffins Pond Dam, Dec 6, 2024.

This wasn't the first odd encounter for Officer Ryan. Two evenings earlier, at roughly 5 PM on December 4, he had stood in the parking lot of his own police station at 1033 Weldon Road and watched what he described as a fixed-wing drone, about the size of a car, gray in color, flying low over Jefferson Township PD headquarters. Officer Matthew Johnson documented the incident. The sighting was routed to Morris County Communications, the NJSP Regional Operations and Intelligence Center, and NJOHSP CTWatch. 

Jefferson Twp PD Case 24-47335. 1033 Weldon Rd, Dec 4, 2024.

This is one of the more revealing records among the many thousands New Jersey produced that winter. Between mid-November and late December 2024, residents filed over seven thousand drone sightings across the state. But the journey to obtain these records didn't actually start with records. It began with me looking up to the sky, much like the rest of New Jersey.

The Snowbird Confession

In mid-December 2024, I drove around one evening trying to get a glimpse of the fabled drones, and I convinced myself I was looking at history. I had purchased a high-end thermal monocular traditionally used for wildlife spotting with a sensor that, on a cold and clear night, paints warm objects white against a dark sky. Through that scope, over the Monmouth County sky, I saw tiny white-hot circles moving in what I was sure was a deliberate formation of intelligent objects mimicking human craft. They moved together, they shifted spacing, they flew in the direction I would have flown them. I called everyone I knew, filmed it, and was certain I had proof.

A confidant gently walked me through what I was actually looking at: migrating snowbirds. Canada geese at altitude, body heat glowing white-hot through the scope as single or double pixels on an HD thermal image. For a few excited minutes, the tiny little specks looked to me like an other-worldly formation. The "deliberate spacing" was the scatter of a flock in a crosswind. The "intelligent movement" was birds doing the thing birds do every December in New Jersey.

Reader, the embarrassment was total.

The snowbird fiasco taught me one useful habit. When a jaw-dropping drone clip starts going viral and people are swearing it proves something extraordinary, sit with it before agreeing. Start with the prosaic first. Most of what went viral during the wave has an ordinary explanation, and I will show you a specific case of that in Part 2. What kept me going is what didn't fit that pattern.

Silent Light

A few days after, I was out in the yard with the scope, and I saw something that I still, a year on, cannot explain.

Nearing civil twilight, I had just started scanning above the house with my own thermal scope, where I usually pick up the evening rush of inbound and outbound planes. But at that moment, the sky was clear to the naked eye, save for a few faint stars starting to peek out. Scanning with one eye on the scope and the other closed, I stumbled onto a solid white-hot circle, defined, noiseless, unmoving against the dark. I lowered the monocular and looked again with bare eyes. This time there was a light, extremely bright and off-white, like an oncoming headlight floating at two or three hundred feet. No sound. No airframe behind the glare. It started to move to my right, in a straight line, parallel to my roof ridge, slow, controlled, and deliberate. Then it turned, accelerated, and was gone.

I am going to resist the urge to tell you what that was. I do not know what it was. I treat my inability to classify it as a personal puzzle. What I can tell you is what sitting with it did to me.

For weeks after, I tried to reason through it. I built a thermal reference library of hundreds of comparison clips: my own DJI drone at similar altitudes and distance, commercial aircraft on approach, helicopters at traffic-report height, and the birds, bats, and insects that would cooperate. Each one has a signature on the scope and its own way of moving. I have not been able to classify what I recorded against that library. So I had to decide what to do with that fact.

I recalled Lt. Ryan Graves, the F/A-18F Navy pilot whose squadron tracked UAP off the Virginia coast in 2014, and who testified about it before Congress in 2023. He encountered strange objects while flying, and after completing his Navy service he founded Americans for Safe Aerospace, a pilot-led nonprofit for aircrew who have seen what he saw. I do not have his flight hours, his squadron, his nonprofit, or the training that would have told me the geese were geese. What I do have is a public records law and a state full of files nobody has read. The question was narrow and answerable: what did state and local governments know, and when, and did they write any of that down?

626 Requests

New Jersey has this wonderful little law called OPRA, the Open Public Records Act. If officers wrote anything down about these objects, any person has a legal right to request it. So I started filing.

I went for the big fish first: state and federal agencies, what I thought were requests sure to crack the mystery open. The bureaucracy was unimpressed, and peppered me with denials citing statute text that might as well have been Sanskrit. Then the municipalities started coming back. Most drops were clerical. Every so often one would stop me.

The early productions came in before I built anything. Bedminster Township was the big one: a 38-page package from the township's outside counsel. In it were: Trump National Golf Club overflights the week the wave began; red and blue strobes over 900 Lamington Road; Chief Bernardo writing that "As per the FBI, we are not to issue any press releases"; and a five-member House delegation asking Wray, Mayorkas, and Whitaker for a classified briefing. One town, that much paper. That is when I built the software, and filed at scale.

New Jersey is not one set of monolithic files. It is hundreds of custodians sitting on many of the same files. The same federal bulletin can land in fifty inboxes. One custodian releases it lightly redacted. Another produces it in full. A third refuses outright. Bedminster's outside counsel denied me an NJ ROIC intelligence brief on the grounds that he was "not authorized to even review it." Four days later, a different custodian produced it. Two more did the same in the weeks after that. Same law, up to each custodian to interpret. Filing at scale is not just an attempt to always get different documents. It is also an attempt to get the same documents many different ways.

Most custodians worked with me in good faith: records clerks who called to clarify scope, chiefs who forwarded everything they had, redacted lightly, with a note explaining what they could and could not release. A small number of custodians denied the requests, which is within their rights under OPRA's exemptions. However, challenging a denial is within a citizen's rights. For now, it is enough to note the architecture works as designed: the requester asks, the custodian answers or doesn't, and there is clear recourse through the Government Records Council (GRC) or State Superior Court. In practice, most of the work was patience. Several months of filing, waiting, and writing back, and the architecture produced what I had asked for.

And how!

The mix cut across media. Raw radio audio and 911 calls. Body-worn camera footage and computer-aided dispatch logs timestamped to the second. Internal emails never intended for public eyes, DJI flight logs released under OPRA, and note from ATC citing unidentified objects with recordings of their ground speed in knots. Intelligence bulletins, photographs, and videos.

With the help of AI, I indexed all of it into a searchable knowledge graph: 8,850 incidents, 17,480 entities, and 12,924 relationships mapped across nearly every state agency and municipality in New Jersey that might hold drone-related records. Every claim is cited and traced back to the original document for verification.

The author's review dashboard, playing back the wave as it unfolded.

That is how one question, what did state and local governments actually know, turned into a readable, sourced timeline of the wave. The rest of this series is what that timeline looks like, read in the order it was written, next to the one the public was given. Here is where it begins:

A low volume of routine drone CAD reports had been trickling into New Jersey dispatch systems for weeks. Then, starting the night of November 18, 2024, sightings began clustering nightly across Somerset and Morris counties, including over Picatinny Arsenal, the U.S. Army's R&D installation in Rockaway Township. Nightly reports continued through November 24. Somerset County did not wait that long. Eighteen days before most of us had heard the phrase "drone wave," the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office called a same-day Zoom at 3:30 PM on November 19 and distributed a Drone Operator Form to the county’s police chiefs for their responding officers. Its cover email said only: “All, Please see the attached drone operator sheet.” An hour later, at 4:37 PM, South Bound Brook Police Chief Douglas LaGrua, one of the chiefs on that distribution list, wrote his own department under the subject line “CLASSIFIED (NOT FOR PUBLIC RELEASE) URGENT: Suspicious Drone Activity.” The body opened: “Not for public release: currently under investigation by the federal government.” A municipal police chief wrote that sentence in mid-November. In public, nothing had happened yet.

Somerset County Prosecutor's Office Drone Operator Form, Nov 19, 2024.

Howard Altman at defense-beat outlet The War Zone was the one reporter who saw it early. His November 19 story broke the Picatinny sightings publicly, and his coverage has run parallel to this project the whole way through.

Ruling Nothing In, Nothing Out

Before I go further, a few words about what this series is not. It is not a claim about what the drones were. I am not going to tell you they were aliens or foreign adversaries or a classified program, because I do not know, and as best I can tell neither does anyone else publicly. It is not a "cover-up" story either; that word promises a conclusion the records do not deliver. An absence of explanation in the records I have obtained is not the same as proof there is no explanation. The federal agencies with the full picture may have answers I have not yet received.

This series is a careful read of what government agencies in New Jersey wrote down about the wave, compared against what they told the public. The gap between those two things is the story. And: I do not claim my backyard sighting proves anything about the database. I am filing OPRA requests because officers filed reports. Those reports stand on their own, whether or not my sighting means anything at all.

Mostly Right, With Residue

Here is the story you have probably heard about what happened over New Jersey in November and December 2024.

Wikipedia sums it up in a few paragraphs: mass panic fueled by social media, poor nighttime observation, planes misidentified as drones, stars mistaken for hovering craft. A textbook case of social contagion. The FBI and DHS reviewed over 5,000 reports and concluded most sightings were conventional aircraft, hobbyist drones, and celestial objects. On January 28, 2025, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters the drones "were authorized to be flown by the FAA for research and various other reasons."

Case closed.

And here is the thing: that story is mostly right. Most of what people saw really was exactly what the official story says it was. I should know. I fell for the hype myself, loudly. New Jersey Senator Andy Kim confirmed the same pattern during a ride-along with police, pulling up Flightradar24 to identify a reported "drone" as a small airplane in real time. Reason magazine mapped sighting data against commercial flight paths and found that reported sightings in Monmouth County clustered right along the approach corridors to JFK and LaGuardia.

The TSA even prepared an internal slideshow in December 2024 that debunked several high-profile incidents with flight-log overlays, clean explanations that nobody got to see until Reason pried them loose with a FOIA five months later. I expected this.

What I did not expect is the residue. The records include an ATC primary radar return of something clocking 150 knots (172 MPH), captured in a Mercer County sheriff's report that cites the tower. Radios and cameras that stopped recording near unknown aerial objects. Civilians describing location, time, duration, and multiple witnesses in specific enough detail for dispatch logs to check.

And a timing pattern I kept re-running because I did not believe it: activity peaking at 6 PM, concentrating on Thursdays and Fridays, collapsing on Saturdays, a rhythm that nothing about social contagion or recreational flying explains. The state's own NJOEM daily reports show the same 6 PM peak and the same Thursday-Friday concentration in their aggregate data.

The Middle Township case is one I keep coming back to when I test my own skepticism. A police drone operator flying a DJI aircraft wrote in her report that she lost her video feed and her controller link entirely while she was following an aircraft she could not identify. A private consultant Cape May County had brought in went through the flight log and wrote that with a maximum clear line-of-sight range of five miles, it is “highly unusual to lose complete RC signal from ~2200ft away,” which he assessed as a “possible EMI event affecting 2.4/5.8Ghz bands.” The same analysis assessed “no EMI effects to GPS signal,” and allowed that the other aircraft might simply have been transmitting more strongly, though he noted that DJI’s frequency hopping normally prevents that. I do not know what caused it. I know a trained pilot with an instrumented aircraft wrote it down, and I know the flight log says what it says. Separately, on December 14, New Jersey State Police helicopter crews radioed Trenton-Mercer ATC Brandon Dominguez to report two suspected drones at roughly 5,200 feet over the NAWCAD Lakehurst naval facility. Observations from trained aviators in an instrumented aircraft, at altitudes no one in the public messaging was describing.

I have spent months trying to explain each of these away individually. Some of them I can. Most of them I cannot. Behind all of it is a federal, state, and county information architecture built to track exactly this kind of activity, which has yet to produce a public account of what happened.

NJOEM UAS Reporting Data, Dec 16, 2024. 1,029 cumulative events.

The architecture left its own fingerprints in the records. On November 6, 2024, at 9:18 AM, the New York State Intelligence Center distributed an Unclassified/Law Enforcement Sensitive bulletin to New Jersey police departments titled "Signal Jamming Devices and their Implications for Law Enforcement." It was not a drone bulletin. Read in retrospect, it was a bulletin about exactly the kind of radio failure Officers Williams and Ryan would document at Saffins Pond Dam thirty days later.

Two weeks after that bulletin went out, on November 21, Bedminster Township Police Chief Francesco Bernardo wrote to a township official that "we have federal, state, county, and local agencies all involved investigating these incidents," and, in the same email, added a single directive: "As per the FBI, we are not to issue any press releases."

Two weeks later, on December 4, Sgt. Andrew Winter, the Middlesex County Prosecutor's Office Counterterrorism Coordinator, sent a law-enforcement-sensitive email to roughly thirty-four New Jersey agencies flagging concern that "these are foreign actors" focused on "high power tension lines, the electrical grid, our military bases, and law enforcement infrastructure."

Two weeks after that, on December 18, an FBI Public Safety Awareness Report (OPE-25-SA-005) on the wave was jointly issued by the FBI Office of Partner Engagement, the Newark Field Office, the Critical Incident Response Group, and the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. Those documents exist. I have them. I will walk through them in Parts 2 and 5. For now I want you to notice only this: what officials wrote to each other does not match what they told the public.

Bedminster Chief Francesco Bernardo to a township official, Nov 21, 2024.

FBI Public Safety Awareness Report OPE-25-SA-005, Dec 18, 2024.

What's coming

Part 2 — Pursued Federally. What the records show federal agencies actually did while the public was told there was no credible threat. (Published.)

Parts 3, 4, and 5 are in progress. The order and emphasis are still being set as records arrive and the investigation continues.

Updated May 14, 2026. Correction (August 10, 2026): This piece originally attributed the email subject-lined “CLASSIFIED (NOT FOR PUBLIC RELEASE) URGENT: Suspicious Drone Activity” to the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office. Two documents from the same afternoon had been merged into one. The prosecutor’s office distributed a drone operator form at 3:33 PM on November 19, 2024; the CLASSIFIED email was written an hour later by South Bound Brook Police Chief Douglas LaGrua, one of the chiefs on that distribution list, to his own department. The passage has been rewritten. The same paragraph also pointed at November 25 as the day those Somerset County documents came out. They are dated November 19. It also called that material the earliest document in the corpus to treat the sightings as coordinated, which is wrong: a Watchung police captain emailed his own department at 6:41 PM on November 18, a day earlier and in the same county, about drones flying “in pattern over sensitive sites.” Part 2 of this series publishes that email. That sentence has been removed.

This piece also originally said a police drone operator logged electromagnetic interference in the Middle Township case, and that a private consultant later confirmed it. Neither half is what the documents say. Her report describes a camera that went black and a controller that disconnected, and never uses the word interference. The consultant assessed a “possible EMI event” on the 2.4 and 5.8 GHz bands, found “no EMI effects to GPS signal,” and offered a competing explanation. That passage has been rewritten to what the two of them wrote.

FBI report OPE-25-SA-005 was referred to here as a Private Sector Advisory Report, in the text and in a caption. It is a Public Safety Awareness Report.

Report an error to jmalaska@gmail.com.

A note on AI: This project uses AI. AI helped write this article. AI drafted the OPRA template, built the filing pipeline, drafted my replies to custodians, and built the knowledge graph that indexes the 13,500 returned documents. I reviewed the documents and videos the AI flagged as interesting. Filings went out under my name and signature. The documents are real. Every one is a government record produced under a public-records request.